Guest Post: Invention of the Electric Chair

Dentist Alfred P. Southwick is famously known as the creator of the electric chair, a method widely known for executing criminals and accused people.

The story goes that one day, the dentist saw a highly intoxicated fellow touching a live electric generator. The man died an extremely quick death. After having witnessed this, the dentist came to a conclusion. He studied that the conduction of electricity could result in the death of a living being. Since his profession had him perform all medical procedures by making his patients sit on the chair, he came up with the unique idea of an electric chair.

Alfred P. Southwick along with the Governor of New York state, David B. Hill worked tremendously hard to make the law of execution on an electric chair legal and recommended that death by electrocution should be made a legal form of capital punishment.

Finally, on January 1st, 1889 the law went into effect and on August 6th, 1890 the electric chair claimed its first victim, William Kemmler.
 
This guest post has been written by the research group from HappyHealth

"Mrs." is actually an abbreviation for the word "mistress."

"Mistress" is the feminine form of "mister," which originally meant "master." Over the years people garbled the name for the married female, and the word "mistress" took on the meaning of an illicit lover, something far different than its original connotation. Therefore, married women ceased to spell out the full word, leaving "Mrs." as the far more respectable abbreviation!

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Mice that were exposed to heavy metal became aggressive and murderous

One study conducted by David Merrill exposed mice to heavy metal 24 hours a day. The band chosen was Anthrax. The purpose of the study was to see how the heavy metal would affect their ability to learn new things.

Shockingly, the experiment could not be finished because instead of completing the Maze, the heavy metal mice all killed each other.
In further experiments, Merrill exposed the mice to heavy metal for only 10 hours a day. Even though the mice did not become homicidal in this experiment, they were much worse at solving the maze than when they had first encountered it.

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Any unrestrained liquid in space will form a perfect sphere.

I guess first off I should define what is meant by 'unrestrained.' Here on Earth, whenever we see falling liquids they obviously do not take the form of a perfect sphere (have you ever drawn a round raindrop before?). This is not for a lack of 'trying' on the liquid's part; there are simply other forces at work here on Earth that do not allow liquids to become completely spherical. The two culprits that 'restrain' liquids on Earth are gravity and the atmosphere. Gravity keeps the liquid moving toward the Earth and the gases in the atmosphere provide an uneven drag, with both factors resulting in raindrops that are flattened out and deformed. 

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Amazon is now selling more Kindle books than ALL of their print titles combined!

As of this past April 1st, for every 100 print titles the e-commerce site has sold, there have been 105 e-books sold on the Kindle! This includes both paperback and hardcover books and does not count any downloads of the assortment of free Kindle titles that are available. Also, Amazon’s brand-new $114 ad-supported model is now selling more rapidly than the older $139 Kindle. As an avid reader of both E- and “tree” books, I can tell you from personal experience that the Kindle has been worth every dollar for me. I also don’t believe normal books are about to ‘die out’ anytime soon as a result of this digital revolution.

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The inventor of the Pringles had his ashes buried inside one of the tall tubes.

Fredric J. Baur of Cincinnati, OH was so proud of his invention that he requested for his remains to be encased inside of it after he died! During his life, he served as an organic chemist and food technician at Procter & Gamble. In 1966, Baur filed for a patent for the tall, skinny can and the novel method of stacking the curved chips inside.

You weigh less at the Equator

The reason for this is that Earth bulges outward at the Equator because of the planet's rotation and its tendency to stay in a straight line while moving. This creates a gravitational field that is uneven, with more pull on the poles than in the middle. Because of this bulge, a person standing at the Equator is really further from the majority of Earth's mass than a person standing at either of the poles. But don't get your hopes up too much - the weight difference is a mere 0.5%! That's less than a pound for anyone weighing less than 200 pounds.

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A first-class ticket on the Titanic would cost approximately $57,200 today.

Factoring in inflation, the $2,500 first-class tickets would be $57,200. The most expensive rooms on the ill-fated luxury liner would cost more than $103,000 now! On the plus side, you could get access to the swimming pool for only 25 cents! Even adjusting for inflation, it’s less than $6. For 50 cents, or less than 12 inflation-adjusted dollars, you got access to the squash courts, and could play with a professional squash player! You also got access to the Titanic’s 60 chefs. You even got the opportunity to see an iceberg up close for free! (too soon?)

The recent earthquake moved Japan closer to the United States.

Geophysicists found that global positioning stations near the quake’s epicenter moved as far as 13 feet eastward! This does not mean that the entire country shifted, but that the nation has actually grown wider. NASA scientists have also found that the earthquake may have shorted the length of the day by a couple of milliseconds and shifted the Earth’s axis!

An Oscar costs several hundred dollars to produce.

The reason the award is so expensive is because of the gold plating on the outside of each statuette. If it did not contain any gold, an Oscar would be worth less than $100!

And that’s just the materials, not taking into account the labor costs. It takes 10 people more than 5 and a half hour to create each one. Each statue is polished to perfection, and just the polishing requires an entire hour per statue! It ends up taking 3-4 weeks to create all the statues for the awards ceremony.